Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional composer -- Camille Saint-Saens, say, or Richard Strauss -- who does not doubt that the music is the score and the score is the music. That is, poetry is verse and verse is poetry. Given that confidence, he is prepared to take on any subject. In the forty years he has been publishing, Mr. Cassity has never once written about nothing. Without being predictable, his material nevertheless has certain orientations: colonialism, the military, the Sun Belt, popular culture, Biblical figures, the Muslim countries, architecture, technology,...